Adventure Out's Jack Harrison holds keys to survival

When he talks about the wilderness and indigenous skills like fire-starting and flint-knapping (the art of making stone tools), Jack Harrison's tone blends harsh honesty and reflective eloquence.

"There aren't any do-overs in the wild," says the instructor for Santa Cruz-based Adventure Out. "In a survival scenario every move should be intentional.

"Practicing these skills is a way of connecting with the earth and our ancestors, of getting a sense of something bigger."

In today's digitized world of screens and social media, any activity that gets people outside can help combat the stress and anxiety plaguing society. Harrison has developed new courses and expanded Adventure Out's survival and wilderness skills curriculum to include advanced topics like traps and snares, hunting preparation and stone tools.

"Survival skills require you to be fully present," Harrison says.

Born in the North Bay, Harrison grew up hiking the Marin Headlands with his grandmother and her friend Elizabeth Terwilliger, a famed local naturalist. He acquired a high level of nature literacy at a young age and took to roaming the woods. His family moved to Indiana briefly and then to Connecticut, where he continued to explore and discovered the artistry of primitive skills.

"Our house in Connecticut backed up to thousands of acres of forest," he says. "There weren't many trails, and you could go for days without seeing people."

This bi-coastal upbringing introduced him to various schools of thought, from attending Tom Brown's famous Tracker School to researching the legacy of Ishi, the last survivor of California's Yana people. Harrison studied the flora and fauna of both regions and filled his free time with exploring the wilderness, occasionally getting in trouble at school for eating edible plants during a fire drill or carrying a squirrel carcass in his lunch sack.

Harrison returned to California at age 16 and traveled the West Coast for a time, rounding out his skill set with more advanced naturalist training, animal tracking tactics and other specialized knowledge. He taught his first class at age 18 and feels a strong sense of responsibility both to his students and to the environment.

Many of his abilities are self-taught, but as an avid reader, he tears through books on survival topics, both dependable and otherwise, to stay abreast of the information that students may have come across. He makes a point to only teach things that he has practiced and would rely on himself.

As passionate people often do, Harrison sometimes finds himself constrained by language itself, where terms like "survival," "primitive" and "indigenous" carry certain connotations or are laced with condescension and misconceptions. And while he admits it is not the most lucrative career path, he has dedicated his life to honing his own outdoor skills and sharing them with others.